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Help Riot improve matchmaking! Looking for examples of bad matchmaking

Have you thought about making it so that people can't use free week champions in a ranked game unless they own the champion, it ruins games when someone joined a ranked game just to try out a free week champion.

Yes, this has been discussed among other issues related to better messaging on what Ranked is about (be prepared and ready to bring your best!) and raising barriers of entry into Ranked so that when people do play Ranked, they understand the competitive nature and intentions of their teammates.

There is potential for abuse here. For example, take a current player who is absolutely top notch with Annie. Let's say this player's true skill is around 1800.

This player could play other champs to around 1800, then start using Annie--with a high K-factor, he can now blow up the ranks towards the 2000+ range, even though he theoretically should just be a 1800 level player.

Alternatively, players who are quite strong with multiple champs could 'rotate' through the champs to maximize K-factors in every single match, propelling him far above his true skill range because he is essentially getting bonus placement matches.

How would this be any worse than the current system where players in newbie island have a high K-factor? At least with the mentioned suggestion, the Annie player would be gaining Elo against actual 1800 players. If a player can get to 2000+ playing only Annie, does it really matter if that takes 6 games or 60?

What about being able to choose a lane. Not necciarly pick a role but at least pre pick a lane you want? It sucks getting ******nozzles who autolock and scream out MID. What sucks even worse is to then having to become the ******nozzle just to get said position. I wouldn't mind longer queue times if i meant i could be in a certain lane. And just comitting to a lane wouldn't necessarily break/make metas it just would let you claim a certain place? Or at least let people know you're intet to take a certain lane as any type of character. Does that make sense?

What about being able to choose a lane. Not necciarly pick a role but at least pre pick a lane you want? It sucks getting ******nozzles who autolock and scream out MID. What sucks even worse is to then having to become the ******nozzle just to get said position. I wouldn't mind longer queue times if i meant i could be in a certain lane. And just comitting to a lane wouldn't necessarily break/make metas it just would let you claim a certain place? Or at least let people know you're intet to take a certain lane as any type of character. Does that make sense?

To clarify this would be different than claiming a role like tank/fighter/mage. While certain lanes are assumed for certain roles. Being able to at least claim the lane you'd want would leave the option open to be what ever you wanted.

I hesitate to let people choose their 'desired' win%s. Explaining a system like that to a player is complicated and we risk overwhelming players with math when it does not necessarily add value to their experience.

Allowing people to flag their role, or the many posts suggesting 'group finders' are neat ideas; but very difficult to implement. This is not to say it is impossible, but it is an idea that we must tread carefully with and really consider the advantages and added value it provides our players.

One, we have to be careful we do not recommend or push metas or 'suggested team compositions' on our players.

Two, we have to be weary of some roles or lanes being less popular, and increasing queue lengths into unsatisfactory levels.

Three, we do not want to profile a champ as a 'jungler' or 'mage' necessarily. One of the great things about League is that you can build champs many different ways. Some players build AP Master Yi and that works. Some players build AD Twisted Fate, and some build AP Twisted Fate. We never want to stifle creativity. If we label the vast majority of champs as 'viable' for multiple roles... then I am not sure we are actually helping the situation all that much.

There are possible solutions to each and every issue; but, tackling all the problems elegantly is not easy!

I fundamentally disagree with the mentality here:

"One, we have to be careful we do not recommend or push metas or 'suggested team compositions' on our players."

Riot has ALREADY created/pushed/recommended the meta in the way they design the game. With the exchange rate of information, the player base is going to naturally find the best "prescription" for winning on it's own, based upon the rules of the game. It isn't something just made up and clinged onto for no reason. It has to do with the way experience gains work, how gold is made, and the way certain characters scale.

Remember the aoe ult meta? Riot created it by making several characters aoe ults too powerful, and stacking them in teamfights was unbeatable. They "fixed" this by nerfing some of them.

Remember the Tanky DPS meta? Well, there were a few bruisers who did a little too much damage for how tanky they were, and were basically so much better than other characters, that they would dominate the game by themselves in many occasions.

There is a dissonance here that I really don't get. If you ask any Riot employee or high elo player what the best team comp is, I'm sure they'll describe some version of what we call the "meta." But at the same time, they don't want to acknowledge it, and they never want to put "pressure" on players to follow it, even though, for those that play ranked, we basically know that if one team follow the "meta" and one team doesn't (no support, no jungler, a character not suitable for soloing going top, etc.), it's obvious who's going to win.

You want to see the meta change? Change the way the games work. Make experience shared globally, the meta will change overnight. Make carries less reliant on gold, you'll see the meta change overnight. Make wards free (1 per 5 minutes or something) and you'll see the meta change overnight. Take away last hitting.....you get the point. I'm not even saying any of these things should happen, I'm just trying to illustrate that Riot and the game design determine the meta, it's not just made up.

Having said all that, I LIKE the current meta and I believe there are many other plays that like it too. It's certainly the best one we have had. I wish Riot would just embrace it and admit that it's the best way to win a ranked game. Then, maybe they could create mechanisms that would prevent games ruined by auto locking or picking a second ranged ad carry to troll you bottom.

I am glad the matchmaking is finally [maybe] being taken care of. I have an idea of how one could go about making the experience better at least in a ranked scenario. Take the Average kda of a player, and match them in teams with people of similar kda as well as similar wins/losses in ranked. I cannot tell you how many times I have had people with 5 wins on my team in ranked, with me having 150+ wins. I have made it a habit of looking at the match history of everyone on my team that goes negative, and the majority of their time, they are negative in all of their games and have a negative kda. Yes there will still be that rng which there always will be, but this will be a huge step in the right direction of correcting the games, and rewarding those that do well in games.

Hi everyone, I am investigating several potential upgrades for the matchmaking systems and am interested in collecting some feedback from you – the players! If you have played a game you felt you had no chance of winning, or a game where you felt a player or two was too high or too low skill for the game, help me improve the matchmaking!

4) Were you queuing with a friend?
a. If yes, how many friends? (1, 2, 3, 4?)
b. If yes, and ranked, what were you and your friends’ Elo(s)?
c. If yes, and normal mode or normal draft, what was the Level and win/loss of you and your friends?

5) If you are below Level 30, do you have a Level 30 account?

6) Any specific reason(s) you felt the game was unbalanced?

7) A screenshot of the end-game score

1) White Ren
2) Ranked 1600-1800 Elo
3) Summoner's Rift
4) No.
5) I am level 30
6) The other team had a duo queue bottom that didn't play very well and the game ended up being very one sided.

Lately I have played a lot of ranked teams on the EU server. The matchmaking intention seems good, but I don't see it working. Most of our matches are VERY lopsided in that we either stomp or get stomped. None of the games are even matched.
I think this has to do with the rating system: new teams generally start with a lower rating, and we often face teams who are still doing their placement matches while they are a lot stronger players in general.

In short, ranked teams rating is flawed in the 1200-1500 range where you find new teams with strong players (low rating teams with platinum players) and "weaker" players in teams that played more games and got relatively more rating. The result is that most games seem to be imbalanced, even if team Elo is the same.

I hope you could take a look at this. I don't have any screen-shots available at the moment, though.